The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

by Casper Erichsen

  Categorised as ‘colonial peoples’, the Slavs could not expect the protection of European law. The conventions of warfare that secured the rights of combatants and prisoners of war had never been fully applied to Africans, Asians or the Native Americans. The Nazis withdrew the same rights from the Slavs, in part, by denying their status as Europeans.

  The re-categorising of the Slavic peoples was not only critical in encouraging the army to abandon the rules of ‘civilised warfare’, it was also a prerequisite for colonial rule. Unlike the Jews who were to be entirely removed from the German living space, between 14 and 15 million Slavs would remain under General Plan Ost. They were to form a class of virtual slaves and their labour used to construct the farms and villages of the German East and work their fields under the watchful settlers.

  To confirm the Slavs’ position, the Nazis, in both their own thinking and their propaganda, employed stereotypes inherited from the colonial tradition. Unable to point to external racial differences like skin colour, they fell back on some of the oldest racial characterisations. The Russians, like the Africans, were described as brutal monsters capable of terrible violence and as being ‘natural born slaves who feel the need of a master’.

  They were viewed as Erich Koch described the Ukrainians: as ‘white niggers’.16 This caricature of servility and brutality came straight out of European colonial racism, and was exactly how Rudyard Kipling had described the Africans and Indians of the British Empire in verse forty years earlier: ‘Half Devil and half child’.

  In taking up the white man’s burden in the East, the Nazis completely rejected the principle of using German Kultur to lead and uplift the people of the East, an idea promoted by various nationalists during the years of the Second Reich. The ‘civilising mission’ was one of the very few aspects of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century colonial tradition that Hitler rejected utterly. When railing against this outdated and discredited form of colonialism, Hitler claimed that the greatest mistakes had been made by the missionaries and colonialists of Germany’s pre-war colonies, who he was convinced had been overly concerned with the health, education and spiritual well-being of the native peoples. In one of his after-dinner rants, he explained to his guests that such impulses had been central to the failure of Germany’s pre-war colonies, ‘No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s crèches, hospitals for the natives. All that fills me with rage … Instead of making the natives love us, all that inappropriate care makes them hate us.’17 In another of his conversations Hitler assured his audience that there would be no attempt to ‘civilise’ the Slavs in the new German empire:

  As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp.18

  Hitler was especially adamant that ‘nobody must let loose the German schoolmaster on the eastern territories … The ideal solution would be to teach this people an elementary kind of mimicry. One asks less of them than one does of the deaf and dumb.’19 On another occasion he suggested that

  A loudspeaker should be installed in each village, to provide them with odd items of news and, above all to afford distraction. What possible use to them would a knowledge of politics or economics be? There is also no point in broadcasting any stories of their past history – all the villagers require is music, music and plenty of it. Cheerful music is a great incentive to hard work, give them plenty of opportunities to dance and the villagers will be grateful to us.20

  In the Nazi East, there were to be no missionaries and no schools. Those Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and others permitted to remain would be slaves with no hope of manumission or education. The only technological advances made available to them would be abortion and contraception, in an effort to keep their populations down to acceptable levels.

  The Slavs were to be completely segregated. ‘The life of the German colonist’, Hitler warned, ‘must be kept as far separate from that of the local inhabitants as possible … the easiest way of preventing any fusion between the German and the native population is to encourage the latter to adhere to their own ways and discourage them from aping ours.’21

  Plans for racial separation in the East clearly resemble the schemes and draft laws that were developed in the same years by the Nazis’ Colonial Policy Office for the administration of Germany’s future colonies in Africa. They also built on Nazi rule in occupied Poland where the imagined racial inferiority of the Poles was emphasised in almost every aspect of daily life. As with all truly racialised systems, Nazi colonialism placed racial status above the abilities and achievements of the individual. In September 1941 Hitler explained that, ‘The least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native.’22

  The Slavic population of the Nazi East were to be kept submissive through the colonial policy of divide and rule. Every ethnic division and religious divide was to be magnified by their German overlords. Hitler’s enthusiasm for the policy is palpable in his private conversations. At dinner in April 1942, he delivered a long monologue on how Germany was to divide and then dominate the Slavs:

  Even the village communities must be organised in a manner which precludes any possibility of fusion with neighbouring communities; for example, we must avoid having one solitary church to satisfy the religious needs of large districts, and each village must be made into an independent sect, worshipping God in its own fashion. If some villages as a result wish to practise black magic, after the fashion of Negroes or Indians, we should do nothing to hinder them. In short, our policy in the wide Russian spaces should be to encourage any and every form of dissension and schism.23

  As in Apartheid South Africa and nineteenth-century colonial Africa, segregation was to be accompanied by a tightly controlled system of economic exploitation. In 1915, the colonial writer Paul Rohrbach had argued that only by labouring in the service of the white race did the black peoples of South-West Africa earn any right to existence. In April 1942 Hitler expressed an almost identical conviction, but with the Russians in mind. ‘These people’, he raved, ‘have but one justification for existence – to be used by us economically.’24 The people of the fertile Ukraine were to justify their continued existence by becoming a class of serfs ruled over by German settlers:

  At harvest time we will set up markets … There we will buy up all the cereals and fruit, and sell the more trashy products of our own manufacture. In this way we shall receive for these goods of ours a return considerably more than their intrinsic value … It will also be a splendid market for cheap cotton goods – the more brightly coloured the better … Why should we thwart the longing of these people for bright colours?25

  In Hitler’s plans for the East, only a proportion of the Slavs were to be enslaved. The rest, along with the entire Jewish population, were to be removed – one way or another – from Germany’s Lebensraum. The details of this immense act of ethnic cleansing were at first left to the planners. In the months leading up to the invasion of the USSR, Nazi racial scientists, economists, geographers and agriculturalists began in earnest to grapple with the population problems of the East. Through its various drafts and revisions, the authors of General Plan Ost concluded that in order to make way for German settlers, around 30 million of the current inhabitants of European Russia would have to be pushed out. Other estimates suggested even higher figures: 45 million and more. In some proposed schemes, these tens of millions of people were to be ‘evacuated’ east over the Urals into Siberia. A directive issued in May 1941 showed that the planners had fully grasped what a colonial war in the East would mean for the populations of Poland and the USSR. It stated that ‘The population … especially the urban will have to look forward to the severest of famines. It will be essential to drive the population into Siberia. Efforts to save the population from starving to death by bringing surplus food from the black
soil region can be made only at the expense of feeding Europe.’26

  Three months later Hitler told his entourage that the peoples of the East were to suffer the same fate as the ‘Red Indians’. They were to be exterminated and then simply forgotten. ‘We also eat Canadian wheat,’ he reminded his audience, ‘and don’t think about the Indians.’ Three months later Hermann Göring, the man tasked with the economic exploitation of the former Soviet territories, informed the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Galeazzo Ciano, that between 20 and 30 million Soviets would be confronted by famine in 1942. ‘Perhaps it is as well that it should be so,’ he added, ‘for certain nations must be decimated.’27

  It was Göring who ordered Reinhardt Heydrich to begin work devising a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem, in July 1941. Sometime in the autumn of that year, as 2 million Soviet prisoners of war were being starved to death in holding pens and the death squads of the Einzatzgruppen were massacring thousands of Jews each week, the notion of a ‘territorial solution’ – the expulsion of the Jews from the German Lebensraum – was overtaken by plans for their complete extermination as a race.

  At the start of the war in June 1941, no such plans were in place. Operation Barbarossa was launched as a war for Lebensraum. Hitler did not invade with Auschwitz in mind. While it is certainly true that Nazi plans for the East demanded that it be made a ‘Jew-free space’, few had imagined this could be achieved through the wholesale liquidation of the 11 million Jews within the zone under German occupation. The Jewish Holocaust, the ultimate expression of Nazi violence, emerged from the context of the Nazis’ racial colonial war.

  While the decision to exterminate the Jews was taken sometime in late 1941, the methodology developed slowly, taking shape amid a maelstrom of accidental happenings and coincidences. At times it was driven by the personal sadism of a small number of relatively minor Nazi administrators. Although motivated above all by the fanatical anti-Semitism that lay at the very heart of Nazism, the final nature of the Final Solution was partially determined by a wider process of radicalisation that impacted on almost every aspect of the Nazi project, and which began the moment the war was launched – accelerating perceptibly in the aftermath of German military defeat at the gates of Moscow in late 1941. In the summer of 1940, the regime had seriously investigated the possibility of deporting the Jews of Europe to Madagascar. The failure of Operation Barbarossa ended all possibility of a ‘territorial solution’, even in the East, although it must be remembered that the ‘territorial solutions’ proposed in documents like General Plan Ost would have proved genocidal to both Jews and Slavs.

  Labour camps and death camps were a policy of last resort for the Nazis, just as concentration camps had been for the British in South Africa and the Kaiser’s army in South-West Africa. General von Trotha had sought to annihilate the Herero in the great encirclement at the Waterberg or – when this proved impractical – to push them into the Omaheke. He had not envisaged that they would be slowly worked and starved to death by the civilian authorities and private companies in concentration camps.

  In 1942, the Nazis’ war in the East ran into the same crisis and contradictions that had halted von Trotha’s war in South-West Africa in 1905. The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. These contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour became a means of liquidation. The Nazis termed this ‘extermination through labour’. The direct impact that the labour shortage had on treatment of the peoples of the Nazi East was demonstrated most dramatically by the Nazis’ attitudes towards Soviet prisoners of war. During the terrible winter of 1941–2, around 2.2 million Soviet soldiers were starved, frozen and beaten to death in vast open-air pens. Six hundred thousand were simply shot and a small number gassed in the first mobile gassing vans. This was the first Nazi genocide.28 Although a further 1.3 million Soviets died in German captivity between the end of February 1942 and the end of the war, the faltering war economy dictated that the prisoners of war be exploited as slave labour rather than simply liquidated, preventing a repetition of the mass extermination seen during the first winter of the war.

  The Nazis had begun to exploit the labour of their racial and political enemies in concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) even before the war. Yet in 1941 the camps housed fewer than 1 million prisoners. By 1945 the system had evolved into a vast network of facilities of various types and had exterminated 11 million people, enslaving another 6 million. This was realised through an incessant and furious process of invention and radicalisation. Like the colonial authorities of German South-West Africa, who adapted the original concentration camp concept inherited from the British and the Spanish, the Nazis added their own modifications. Count von Stillfried’s ‘confined areas’ and regime of forced labour were replicated in the Nazi East, as was the practice of selecting the work-able from the work-unable. The scale was vastly different but the principles broadly the same.

  Yet even on Shark Island, the worst of the South-West African camps, there had been a half-hearted attempt to harness the labour of the prisoners. Shark Island can be considered a death camp in that extermination of the prisoners clearly took precedence over the work they were ostensibly deployed to carry out. The equanimity with which the civilian colonial authorities accepted the failure of the infrastructure projects on which the Nama worked demonstrated that such works were of secondary importance and the extermination of the prisoners the primary function of the camp. The critical Nazi refinement of the death camp concept was to create camps in which any pretence at forced labour was abandoned. Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdenek, Belzek and Chelmno differed from Shark Island, and from the other Nazi camps, in that they were simply factories for killing. There the regime made no effort to exploit the labour of the vast majority of those who passed through their gates. Indeed, the Final Solution absorbed men and resources, and ran counter to military pragmatism. These were camps with no alibi, no cover story and no ‘product’, other than liquidation.

  Notes – 18 Germany’s California

  1. J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds), Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945 (University of Exeter Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 622.

  2. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia: 1941–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 296.

  3. The Goebbels Diaries 1942–1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 126.

  4. Hannah Arendt was among the first historians to suggest such a link, while recent publications by Adam Toze and Mark Mazower have done much to set Nazism within the wider context of colonialism and colonial violence.

  5. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003), p. 50.

  6. Thanks to Robert Gordon for both of these quotations.

  7. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), p. 24.

  8. Ibid., p. 574.

  9. Monologue im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–4: die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, herausgegeben von Werner Jochmann, p. 377: 30 August 1942.

  10. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 469.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., p. 19.

  13. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, pp. 918–20.

  14. Wendy Lower, ‘Hitler’s Garden of Eden in Ukraine: Nazi Colonialism, Volkdeutsche and the Holocaust, 1941–1944’, in Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds), In Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), p. 187.

  15. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, p. 1090.

  16. Robert Cecil, Hitler’s Decision to Invade Russia, 1941 (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975), p. 206.

  17. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 319.

  18. Ibid., p. 617.

  1
9. Ibid., p. 354.

  20. Ibid., p. 425.

  21. Ibid., p. 575.

  22. Ibid., p. 34.

  23. Ibid., p. 424.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid., p. 617.

  26. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (HarperCollins, 1991), p. 773.

  27. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), p. 854.

  28. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, p. 915.

  EPILOGUE

  The Triumph of Amnesia

  During World War II, both German scholars and members of the Nazi elite came to recognise that the war in the East, and the regime’s murderous treatment of its racial enemies, were redolent of the bloodier episodes in colonial history. Yet during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and 1947, the International Military Tribunal and the governments it represented avoided making similar connections. The memory of the German genocides committed in South-West Africa, so important at Versailles in 1919, were overlooked at Nuremberg a generation later. This is partly explained by ‘colonial amnesia’ – Europe’s propensity for ignoring or forgetting the colonial past. However, in 1945, with the greater part of Asia and almost all of Africa still under colonial rule, the victorious and liberated powers of Europe had more immediate reasons for wanting to close their eyes to the darker aspects of colonial history.